Reviews tagging 'Ableism'

Content Warning for a graphic and lengthy depiction of mass rape (the novel) and my discussion about the way the topic is handled by the author. Also the book is unrelentlingly oppressive and a very tough read overall.
Also, this is an analysis as much as a review, so expect spoilers ahead.

An excellent premise
Setting out to read Blindness for my book club, I pictured an adventure story where the newly blind wander into a broken-down post-apocalyptic society and use their human companionship, creativity, and resillience to overcome the various obstacles around them despite their disability, eventually building a new society adapted for the blind. It reminded me a little of The Ables, a book I have heard about but not gotten around to read, about kids who have superpowers, but also various disabilities, such as a boy who is psychic, but also blind. I wish there were more representation of people with disabilities in fiction, and I still think Blindness' premise is an ingenious twist on an apocalyptic novel.

I wish someone would write it some day.

What we get instead is hours of unbroken misery porn that mostly fails to actually explore the setting and predicaments it creates for its characters, with every event seemingly made to reinforce the point that the blind, and by extension whatever group they're meant to represent, are helpless, oblivious, and unable to do anything on their own without getting themselves hurt or killed, and thus need to be constantly chaperoned by the one character who magically retains her eye sight.

It seemed to me the worst possible way you could use the book's excellent premise, and also comes across as a massive cop-out -- nearly every problem in the book, even things that would not even have required sight, such as coming across a pair of scissors and using them in to avert a sexual assault, is solved by this ever-present Deus ex Machina and her comically strong plot armour. This not only denies the blind characters the potential for creative problem-solving and character growth, but also removes much of the suspense of the story, as you quickly learn that no matter what situations she finds herself in, the able character always emerges unschathed.

Just as frustratingly, I found the writing itself to be terrible, which was baffling given Blindness was written by a seasoned author. The characters are paper-thin and one-dimensional, like cardboard cut-outs of real people, almost all the dialogue is shallow and stilted, and so many of the actions taken in the book simply makes no sense. In particular, the military men and politicians, both in terms of dialogue and their response to the pandemic, read as imagined by a 12 year old boy.

Also, Saramago seems to go out of his way to cancel out the blind characters' few successes with equally harsh tragedies, which often revolve around 'punishing' the blind for setting out to do things on their own. A character succeeds at starting a fire, but immolates herself in the process. The seeing character opens a path to a basement full of food, only to return to find that a group of blind people have fallen to their deaths trying to descend the rickety stairs. I can only assume Saramago is making is an extremely heavy-handed metaphor about the privilegued and less fortunate in society, but in the end it just feels like the book has it out for its own characters, like the evil computer that tortures its captive humans in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

On crisis, endurance, and saviours
In fact, while I think Blindness is meant to be a commentary on class, not race, Blindness' depiction of its blind as helpless primitives in need of a saviour reminds me of those old adventure stories where the protagonists go to Africa, and the only Africans they meet are half-naked natives living in straw huts, whose only role is to threaten and/or require aid from the white protagonists. Or modern depictions of African crises, where you see helpless civilians and starvation victims in dusty villages, menacing warriors on pickup trucks, and the archetypical white saviour, represented by the blond girl with an African baby on her arm. Rarely is there room in the narrative for local heroes, positive developments, or even understanding of why there's a conflict in the first place.

Like the Africans in oversimplified Western narratives, the blind in Blindness exist seemingly only to serve the role of helpless, bickering victims (or, in a particularly harrowing part of the book, gruesome villains). Given that Saramago was a communist most of his life, my interpretation is that the blind are meant to represent the proletariat, with the seeing character representing a Marx-like messiah, the enlightened come to save the ignorant and feuding working class from itself.

Either way, this patronizing, borderline imperialist way of describing a group of humans as a mass of helpless people who need some kind of outside messianic intervention because they can't be expected to improve their situation on their own, feels very out of place in a book from 1999, and the portrayal of the blind (and, again, whatever group Saramago intends for them to represent) in this way throughout all of Blindness makes the book incredibly hard to stomach.

Frustrated with Blindness, and wanting a more realistic and less prejudiced take on concentration camp prisoners and their experience, I picked up Last Stop Auschwitz, a journal Eddy de Wind wrote in captivity, and it reminded me how much it takes to break human beings -- I remember the one prisoner in the book who was too starved, exhausted, and sleep-deprived to sit up in his bunk, but was still able to have an actual conversation, even joking and reflecting upon his situation.

When we follow the news reports of the war in Ukraine, a conflict given the coverage it deserves, instead of just hopelessness and misery we see endurance, courage, and humanity in all its forms. A boy living in a city under bombardment from the air manages to score the number of a cute girl he meets in a bomb shelter. Farmers in tractors make off with Russian tanks. Ukrainian soldiers give a captive Russian tea and lets him call his mom.

There is evil and hopelessness among the Ukrainians, too, no doubt, but seemingly no matter what we go through, it takes a lot for human beings to stop being human beings. We laugh, we joke, we help each other, we hope, we persist. There are good moments intertwined with the misery. Humans endure.

In Blindness, the protagonists quickly shut down to a near-catatonic state, while the narrator, a character in their own right, adds insult to injury by taking on a pitiless and antagonistic role. They seem to relish in the blind characters' suffering, describes them as worthless in nature of their blindness (a sentiment shared by the machine-gun toting guards and even the blind themselves), often do not even bother explaining why they won't think of the most simple solutions to their problems or do much of anything to improve their situation, or why they fail to notice the most obvious things around them, or just blames these failures on their blindness. Why is there starvation and war in South Sudan? Oh, it's always been that way down there, you can't expect too much from Africa.

Also, beyond describing how the community of the abandoned captives inevitably breaks down from lack of food, water, and authority, and how a gang of hoodlums take advantage of the power vacuum, there is little actual exploration of the experience of blindness or the overall post-apocalyptic setting, apart from mostly shallow, childlike observations like "look, men and women get naked together!" or such stunning insights as "in times of crisis, people will swarm the banks to withdraw their savings!"

Purgatory, trauma, and magically healing fractures
The plot for most of the book consists almost solely of a series of increasingly terrible tragedies and catastrophes befalling the captive blind characters. Moments of reflection, hope, or even meaningful conversation are few and far-between, and many of the situations escalate fast enough to break all suspension of disbelief, as if Saramago has no time to actually write a good book because he is in such a hurry to get through all the horrors he has in store for the blind. It's like reading I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, except the unrelentingly hostile entity that hates the protagonists is the author himself.

Saramago also, in his infinite wisdom, adheres to that endlessly frustrating trope of handling rape in fiction by killing the perpetrators for then to pretend that the assault itself (which in most stories seems to be there for cheap shock effect, or to establish some character as a villain) never happened, as if the author has the idea that killing the perp "unrapes" the survivors, who aren't given a "recovery arc" in which they get to deal with and grow from their trauma, but instead magically go on to function normally.

Imagine reading a graphic depiction of a character breaking their leg, only to turn the page to find them walking normally, their injury instantly forgotten, and you get an idea of how jarring I find this experience, every time.

What's that, Saramago, you broke both legs of every female character in the book only to have them walk it off from one page to the next? No trauma from having to endure repeated mass rapes because they depended on their abusers for food, you just had one of the survivors be slightly traumatized and berate herself for killing one of them in self-defense? Sure, mate, no harm done, I left my suspension of disbelief somewhere around the point where the government failed to institute a lockdown and threw patient zero and company in a concentration camp instead of allowing scientists to study their disease. At this point I wouldn't lift an eyebrow if Hagrid knocked down the door and whisked a character off to Hogwarts. You do you.

A book that hurts people
Blindness does improve in the final chapters, allowing the characters to leave their prison when it is abandoned by the soldiers, like Eddy de Wind and his fellow inmates stumbling out of Auschwitch. Saramago lets them find food and shelter and start on a path to recovery, and he even has the grace to introduce a few thriving and resourceful blind characters, albeit still in a patronizing way ("look, a blind person who can write!"). At this point Blindness almost becomes an enjoyable read.

The damage is done, however -- despite this late-stage offering, the book has done too much I can't forgive it for, like a partner in an abusive relationship who manages to be nice to you in the final weeks before you leave them.

I have read my fair share of tough fiction and non-fiction, and while they've all been challenging to get through in their own ways, Blindness is the first book that is so unrelentingly dark in every way, from the non-stop horror, misery, and helpless characters to the gleeful, antagonistic narrator, that it actually seems hostile, as if it was written not just to be scary or unsettling, but actually to genuenly make the reader suffer. I've read plenty fiction that I disliked, but Blindness is the first book that managed to make me angry with the way it was written -- I found myself literally hating the book as I read it.

What was it Stephen King, that master of horror, said of The Shining, another deeply disturbing work, which he reviled possibly in the same way that I do Blindness?
"I think he set out to make a film that hurts people."

Surviving Blindness
Perhaps I'm coloured by personal experiences that made Blindness so much tougher to read, but the book, to me, was so unrelentingly dark, disturbing, infuriating, and almost traumatic that in the end the read felt like a battle, to be won or lost. I listened to the end not to learn the ending, and not out of any kind of interest, but because I didn't want to be defeated by the book.

And it felt like an actual victory.
And... I still can't decide if it's just me, or if this was intentional by the author. I was impressed at first that Saramago managed to make a book feel this way, but upon reflection, I don't really know how much skill it takes to write a tough book by stringing together a neverending series of tragedies and hardships for a bunch of helpless characters.

Either way, I pushed on, all the way to the book's disturbing ending (the rest of the book being what it is, the blind sudddenly regaining the ability to see feels like the ugly duckling being transformed into an actual duck instead of being allowed to blossom as a swan). After finally closing it at the end of the last chapter, relief washing over me that I'd never open the book again, I felt like I was emerging, blinking into the sunlight, from an abusive relationship. I felt relief and closure akin to that which survivors of abuse in fiction are so rarely afforded: it should not have happened, and I hate the perpetrator, but I wouldn't want to be without the experience, because it helped me grow and made me stronger and taught me so much. After hours and hours of suffering and endurance, I survived Blindness.

Like any traumatic experience, the book needs to be internalized and reinterpreted in a way that makes its horrors understandable. As I said, it's not a book you can just read and instantly understand -- as my book club partner kept ensuring me while I read it, you will have to finish it and reflect on it for a couple weeks to discern the meaning between the lines of this clearly metaphorical tale.

As for the meaning -- the only way I could finally make sense of it was to view it as an allegory, a "wealthy man loses everything he owns and has to learn important life lessons and grow as a person before he is allowed to return to a privilegued existence" narrative. Come to think of it, two of the major flaws of the book -- the chronic bad luck of the blind characters and the gleeful, chronically unhelpful, devil-like narrator, fit somewhat into place in this explanation -- there is an actual curse on the blind people, as part of the purgatory they have to go through, and the narrator might even be the devil or genie behind it all.

Or maybe I'm just excusing bad writing. I don't care, the pieces fit and it helps me heal.

Conclusion
All in all, I'm of two minds about how to remember Blindness. It's such an unmitigated dumpster fire that I can't bring myself to do anything but give it a single star and ask for a refund. At the same time, however, managing to finish the book felt like a genuine victory, and made me feel prepared to take on any other written book, no matter how tough.

Also, Saramago's patronizing, one-dimensional portrayal of the blind characters he tortured throughout the book succeeded in provoking me enough that I actually sought out blind peoples' awareness accounts on social media, and grew more conscious about the plight of disabled people in general, the same way reading a white surpremacist blog might make me more conscious about racism, so there's that, at least.

You didn't break me, Blindness. I beat you. My only regret is that I bought it as an audio book. It would've been incredibly satisfying to burn it.

(To add insult to injury, it turns out it was included for free in my Audible account.
I can't even ask for a refund.)

Further reading and watching

Life in the Shadow of Final Fantasy 7's Midgar - YouTube which covers the topic of class struggle and the 'misery porn' approach to describing poverty that I find most problematic with Blindness, particularly the segment about Mary King's Close and its contrast to FF7's depiction of the Midgar slums, from 8:24 to 13:11. I recommend watching the entire video -- Final Fantasy VII is as well-written and worthy of a proper analysis as any good novel.
Last Stop Auschwitz and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - I can sum these up as 'like Blindness, but good'. Together they offer pretty much the same experience. I recommend you just pick up these instead, Last Stop Auschwitz in particular. It is a timeless and important story of a horrible chapter of human history, and also contains plenty of wisdom and reflection.

Content Warnings

okjuls's review against another edition

Go to review page

reflective medium-paced

Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No

4.0

I wished it was longer, I think the world José built was very well thought and I would really like to read more about it! I also like that it is focused on the characters' challenge to navigate the world they suddently find themselves in, and their friendship and mutual aid. Also there are some trigger warnings, for example for rape (but i think there are more that i can't think of right now).

Content Warnings

niaaaaa's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark reflective slow-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Content Warnings

therowdypi's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional hopeful reflective tense slow-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Content Warnings

More...